It seemed fitting that President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral took place only days before President Trump’s second inauguration. Carter has often been described as one of the nation’s worst executives — a pejorative epithet now firmly attached to President Biden’s name as well. So it was painfully symbolic for the lost and confused outgoing president to eulogize his often-disparaged predecessor.
One could be forgiven for wondering whether, at the end of his remarks, Old Joe might try to scooch Jimmy’s body to one side and join him in the casket. Both literally and figuratively, we buried two terrible presidents this January.
Of course, all of America’s living ex-presidents attended Carter’s funeral. Sitting in the same pew at Washington’s National Cathedral, they appeared a perfect rogues’ gallery of corruption and failure. Bill Clinton still looks like the “after” picture for a high school class on the consequences of contracting venereal disease. George W. Bush has aged like a man whose conscience torments his waking hours. Barack Obama resembles a worn photograph of a forgotten celebrity from a bygone era.
Seated among them were the former first ladies. Well, not all of them. Michelle Obama was reportedly so appalled at the thought of sitting next to President Trump (as protocol required) that she decided to ditch tradition and hang out with a wine box in Hawaii. (Personally, I think she dreads having to spend time with her husband and probably resented the public expectation that she pay respects to a white Southerner — even if he was a Democrat.)
On the other side of the pew from Michelle’s void, bitter Hillary Clinton scowled while wedged between her lecherous husband and her “brother,” Dubya. Hillary’s miserable and angry visage reflected the dark and damaged soul of someone who has given everything to the Devil for the promise of power only to see that power ripped from her claws. Her glowering expression fairly represented the sordid group of exes as a whole.
Then there was President Donald J. Trump — no doubt a major trigger for Hillary’s shrewish ire — who almost looks younger and more spirited with each passing year. The contrast in appearance between the vigorous Trump and the rotting Establishment that he has repeatedly outflanked was stark and revealing. Indeed, the image of a happy and confident President Trump separated from a crusty “ruling class” in various stages of decay was difficult to ignore.
On a pew filled with failed former presidents, a returning president was most certainly not like the others. All life gravitated toward the world-historical figure and his beautiful wife seated on the far end. That makes sense. Bill, Hillary, Dubya, Barack, and Old Joe represent America’s mismanaged past, whereas President and First Lady Trump are leading America away from decades of accumulated damage and toward a more promising future.
In an essay years ago, I asked a simple question: “What do Democrats fear in Donald Trump?” I offered a straightforward answer: they fear his potential for greatness. One look at the necrotic assembly present for Carter’s funeral provided visual proof for my asked-and-answered query. The National Cathedral was packed with some of the most powerful Americans from the last half-century — presidents, military chiefs, intelligence heads, central bankers, and Wall Street titans. Not one — aside from President Donald J. Trump — will be remembered as historically exceptional.
The decrepit club of failed former presidents attests to this point. Bill Clinton will be remembered for cheating on Hillary with a White House intern barely old enough to legally drink alcohol. He will be remembered for using the Oval Office as a bordello and renting out the Lincoln Bedroom by the hour. He will be remembered for handing military technology and most-favored-nation trading status to the Chinese Communist Party in return for campaign cash.
He will be remembered for initiating the vast offshoring of America’s industrial and manufacturing jobs to third-world countries and the vast transfer of middle-class Americans’ wealth to foreign adversaries. He will be remembered for privatizing the prison system and filling new cells with black Americans. He will be remembered as a venal and lascivious liar whose proclivities for self-aggrandizement, fraud, and falsehood were surpassed only by those of his even more corrupt wife.
George W. Bush, I am sorry to say, will be remembered for only three things: (1) failing to prevent the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, (2) launching a global “war on terror” that cost too many lives and too much money for questionable strategic objectives, and (3) constructing a post-9/11 national security surveillance state that trashed the Bill of Rights and turned every American into a criminal suspect. By advocating for mass amnesty while using the PATRIOT Act to destroy Americans’ Fourth Amendment right to be secure from unreasonable and warrantless searches, Bush left Americans both less safe and less free.
Barack Obama forfeited his shot at greatness. He could have united the country by framing his presidency as the visible culmination of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s worthy “dream.” He could have offered his election as evidence that America is becoming a post-racial society that values character over skin color. Had Obama done so, support for his brand of politics would have been so great that there might not even be a Republican Party today. Instead, he and “wingman” Attorney General Eric Holder spent eight years rubbing salt in old racial wounds and dividing the country for expedient political victories.
Transforming the architecture of Bush’s unconstitutional post-9/11 surveillance state into a Deep State machine for monitoring, censoring, and criminally punishing political foes, Obama and Holder further dismantled the Bill of Rights and diminished America’s historic foundations in individual liberty. Because petty vindictiveness has always blinded Obama, he squandered any chance at greatness.
The words “Joe Biden” and “greatness” look odd in the same sentence because Dementia Joe has always been an unimpressive politician of low character and even lower intelligence. He is the poster boy for mediocrity, and the Deep State alone is responsible for his installation as president. The Intelligence Community defrauded American voters during the 2020 election by claiming that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was “Russian disinformation” and censoring the story.
Democrat officials ignored election security laws by allowing political operatives to flood Democrat-controlled precincts with unverified (and most likely fraudulent) mail-in ballots. To this day, no mainstream news “reporter” can explain how President Trump could lose an election in which he won nearly every traditional bellwether county by double-digits. No credentialed “journalist” can explain how Joe Biden — a man who struggled to win Democrat primaries — could wind up with more votes in the 2020 general election than any candidate in U.S. history.
No national pundit can explain why the “most popular” politician of all time would have to bow out of the 2024 race. Americans know the truth, even if Establishment censors insist on telling lies. Cheating his way into office precluded Biden’s achieving greatness of any kind. Acting as a puppet for Barack Obama, in fact, precluded his even being a real president.
Sitting next to all those failures and frauds at Carter’s funeral, President Donald J. Trump stood out. He’s faced the fire and pushed forward. His enemies have thrown everything at him, and still he stands. The Deep State allowed two separate assassins to threaten his life, and the man never stopped fighting. Impeachments, Democrat-funded civil lawsuits, criminal trials, FBI raids, attempts to remove him from state ballots — the Establishment Class has done whatever it can to keep Trump from representing the American people. Yet he returns to office with a huge political mandate.
This presidency will break the mold. History will be made. Buckle up. Get ready. This is going to be great.
- Hand-curated links from conservative and Christian sites — NO legacy media garbage links. Patriots get their news every day at JDRucker.com
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
This was a Coronation not an Inauguration, because we’ll give Trump whatever he needs including dictatorial command if he needs it to keep his promises, of this time, to truly drain the swamp, and he has the cabinet to do it.